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Sunday, 14 February 2016

A Tale of Four Oldhammer Gamers: Plague Skeletons

It is Sunday as I write this. Tomorrow brings the first day of half-term and the joyous realisation that I do not have to go to school for another whole week! I have a serious amount of painting to try and get in over the next week as a number of projects draw to a close and others spring up anew from the depths of my lead pile.

As you will no doubt be aware, Paul, Steve, Ringo and I are all attempting one of those monthly 'Tale of Four Gamers' things, in the hope of joining up at the next BOYL and doing battle with the forces we raise. You will probably recall my post last month about my recently completed plague skeletons. Well, it has taken me ages to get the remaining troops finished and fit for the table, but with all the natural light flooding into my conservatory today, I managed to get them completed.

Looking at the three models above, I can see how very different they have come out. I painted the converted standard bearer first, using a broken figure as a basis, cutting off the staff and replacing the missing hand. Adding the banner pole was quite simple; I used a pin-vice to drill through the raised hand and just pushed some fairly sturdy wire through the hole.

The heavily armoured chap on the right followed. A sense of deja vu came over me as I worked on this one, as this dolly saw a lot of action across the 1980s and numerous model variants exist. In the past I have struggled to get a decent finish on the chaos versions, so stuck to a very simple drybrush and highlight method on the armour, which covers most of the figure. The haft of the axe needed to contrast with all the nearby metals, so I chose an earthy brown to pick that out. using my smallest brush, I highlighted a grain effect like I usually do. The skull and hair where done as normal, using the excellent Foundry triads for both.

The final model was the central one. This one is also a variant, though perhaps a more famous one. He is, of course, another version of Mordini from the Nightmare Legion. Considering he is supposed to be in a Nurgle army he has come out a little, well, purple. My reasoning is thus; he was a Slanneshi or Tzeentch Chaos champion who was killed by the Plague Lord's forces and resurrected as an undead champion - in thrall to a hated master. I am sure Nurgle would find such a situation most amusing.

Here is the completed unit for my Nurgle force. As I said before, I wanted to make each skeleton different but not feel the need to make them look like a Nurgle unit. These are the raised dead that have fought against my army, not followers of the Father of Flies. I had fun with the different shield designs and with the paper banner. Keeping things a bit generic helps me in other ways, as adding some of my other painted skeletons (completed way back when in the early days of this blog) creates a ten figure unit for my undead force.

Lovely. That hero looks like the body of Enzo and the head of his champion. Was he ever released as part of the nightmare legion, or is he just another champion from the era based of those sculpts? Either way, I need one. :)

Really strong work, I especially like the proper huge 80s standard (essential for any self respecting Army of the Damned) and those shields. I agree that the use of enemy troops as allied undead is very Nurglesque, a bit like that fluff about the Champion of Khorne who gets Nurgle's Rot.